OnePlus 3 Smartphone Review: A Powerful device Available at a Competitive Price

In a very short span of time OnePlus has created a buzz in the smartphone market. OnePlus, this time, launches its flagship phone OnePlus 3 with a tag line i.e “ Never Settle”, which is really true. OnePlus always brings flagship devices in the market at a very competitive price, which you can rarely found with any other flagship smartphone.

Detailed OnePlus 3 Specifications

Feel and look

OnePlus 3 comes with an ergonomic solid design which gives it a premium look and comfortable feel in your hand. The body of the phone is carved out from a single piece of aluminum that means it has a uni-body design. The rear panel has a sandstone finish and Graphite in color (the review unit we got) with a bulging camera. The sides are slightly curved like Galaxy s7 Edge but not that much thin. The device is 158g in weight and 7.3mm thin but as compared to its size the phone feels very light in weight.

As we said the phone designed so ergonomically,  the left side hosts volume rockers and a mute switch like iPhones’,  just above the volume rockers. The mute switch  has three push steps , the first step is the normal mode, the second step is enabling only priority notifications and the third push will put your phone in silent mode, it really saves your time. The right side of the phone is accomplished with a power/lock button and a pushable nano-Sim card tray.

Not only the rear panel of this phone looks great but up front is also designed very well.  The above front portion of the phone is as usual like other premium  phones (front camera, sensors, and earpiece) but the below part has something interesting, it has a button. The button looks like a pressable physical button but oops it is not, it is a touch-sensitive biometric sensor button. It can use as fingerprint unlocker and a tap button  to go back to your home screen. Also on the both sides of the home button, you will find invisible backlit capacitive touch keys. You can customize all of them as per your need including home button.  Basically, in the setting OnePlus 3, it provides an option which allows you to change the functions of these keys such as right key can be used to back and left for multitasking or vice versa, the home button can be used to turn off the display, recent task, quick shelf and more. There are people those like on-screen buttons like the Nexus phones have, so don’t worry OnePlus also resolve this issue, you can disable the capacitive touch buttons and enable the onscreen home, back and multitasking buttons from the setting option.  At the bottom, it has USB-C type micro USB port, speaker grills and 3.5mm headphone jack curved out very beautifully.

Overall about the design, we would like to say it has the mixture of the elements borrowed from the iPhone 6 and the Galaxy edge 7.

 Display and Camera

If you worry about you favorite videos or games that how it will look on this phone then you don't have to worry. The display of OnePlus 3 is 5.5-inch  AMOLED display with 1080x1920 (Full HD) resolution with pixel density of 401ppi. The AMOLED screens are not bright as IPS LCD but they are better when it come to black levels,contrast ratio, and color reproduction. The color level and viewing angle of the phone is great and make it best for watching videos  and playing games.  It has 2-D curved Gorilla Glass 4 protection with pre-applied screen protector film, not of very high quality but  thanks to OnePLus at least we are getting it.

The OnePlus 3 camera section uses a 16-MP sony IMX298, a 1/2.8’ sensor with a f/2.0 lens that can be effectively focused at the distance of 29mm. The camera’s autofocus is quite very fast  due to PDAF technology apart this technology it also features optical image stabilization and RAW image format support. The camera app is Google stock Android app and allows you to  click pictures instantly as soon as you click the shutter button . You get different modes in the camera app such as slow motion,video, manual, and panorama. Colors are vibrant and pictures are bright. The low light shots are a little bit grainy.The rear camera can capture the videos up to 4K resolution whereas slow motion option allows shooting  the video at 120fps. At the front, there is an 8MP selfie shooter camera which captured images in a daylight with outstanding details and sharpness but on another hand, it becomes grainy in low light conditions . You can also use it for capturing videos of 1080p at 30fps.

Overall about the Display and camera, we would like to say that both camera and Display are awesome but still cannot able to beat the iPhone and Galaxy Edge 7 .

About the Operating system

The OnePlus 3 comes with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow as a base for Oxygen OS UI. Although it has Oxygen OS UI but still OnePlus has done very few customization with the OS and you nearly experience a stock Android like Nexus devices.  The main reason for using stock Android with minimal customization is to provide a clean interface and fast performance. Apart from fast performance, it also allows some gestures controls such as wave your hand over the phone, it will show you the time and also some other key customization options which we have been discussed in the design part above. It also allows you to unlock the bootloader easily and quickly to flash or root the device. One more key feature we want to discuss is Dark mode option. This option will turn all the backgrounds in the settings and app drawer in dark black color that helps you to save battery and soothing to your eyes in the night.

Battery, Processor, Performance, and Memory

Under the stylish hood, it has Snapdragon 820 SoC quad-core 2.15 GHz processor which has custom Qualcomm Kryo 64-bit quad-core CPU. Qualcomm designed Kryo to tightly integrated with the Adreno 530 GPU  for high-performance mobile computing. With 6 GB of RAM and Snapdragon 820 processor, the OnePlus 3 shows a great combination of power and performance. From surfing web pages(on chrome browser) to playing games; from launching apps to taking pictures everything works so smoothly and fast, thanks to its 6GB RAM. We ran 24 applications including games like Asphalt 8 and Mortal Komabt all are running in the background still we didn’t find any lag while doing any task . For Gamers, this phone is future proof, it has Adreno 530 GPU which makes this phone perfect for gaming all kinds of high graphics games for Android. We played Asphalt Airborn, Modern Combat 5: Blackout and Mortal kombat x on it and there is no frame rate drop or any lag. If we talk about fingerprint scanner then it unlocks the device in a breeze without any delay, also it placed at the up front bottom which increases the usability and convenience.

If we talk about storage then it has on board 64 GB storage which is an ample amount whereas if we see iPhone that offers 16GB in their basic models at much higher price same with Samsung Galaxy S7 series they also offer 32GB onboard storage. But the plus point with Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is that they also offer a micro-sd slot to expand the memory which might an issue with OnePlus 3 because it lacks micro-sd slot (expandable storage).

OnePlus has 3000mAh, a non-removable battery which used to power the device. Due to Marshmallow Doz mode and AMOLED display, it stands for 7 hours and 20 minutes in our 1080p video loop test. It is a pretty good performance for the 3,000mAh phone. Also, it comes with a quick charger which can charges 0 to 53% in around 30 minutes and 100% in approximately 1 hour that can easily compensate your battery requirement. Yes, if you are a moderate user then it will last the whole day without any issue. While playing heavy graphics games such Mortal Kombat it drains 2% of battery in 3 minutes playing duration that means you can enjoy your high graphics game around 2.5 hours.

Can it beat iPhone and Samsung Galaxy Edge 7 ??

OnePlus no doubt built with plenty of power but it it not going beat iPhone and Galaxy Edge 7 in every aspect. In performance and price, it can beat the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S7. But in other feature such as a battery, Display, camera it not and still try to compete them. But overall our verdict is that One Plus 3 is a super powered device at very affordable price and might be one best choice for a smartphone to buy around 27K.